After a while JW came in bearing gifts. He gave me a Bluetooth headset, which impressed me because I only mentioned once, a few months ago, that I wanted one. K gave me an original portrait he had made of the engines of Sodor, and pointed out each engine. The orange smear was Duncan, the blue smear was Gordon, and so on. Then we sat down to a delicious breakfast of cardamom waffles -- JW had been grinding cardamom seeds while K was hanging out in his crib -- and K, who doesn't have much of a sweet tooth except when it comes to syrup, got very sticky.
After breakfast, JW took K to our local playspace -- probably K's favorite place in the world -- while I had an extra-long workout and leisurely shower. Then I spent a few hours running errands and doing chores, partly to get ready for the arrival of the in-laws (JW's mom: "You know you're getting older when you spend your birthday making meatloaf and grocery shopping.")
In the evening JW and I headed out to Boston, where we had drinks at Top of the Hub and dinner at Hamersley's Bistro. Both were perfect except that the couple sitting a foot away from us at Hamersley's spent the entire time talking about babies and somebody else had actually BROUGHT their baby, who was understandably unhappy to be at a fine dining establishment late on a Saturday night. Luckily that baby headed out shortly after our appetizers arrived. (Probably to a bar.)
We stopped for ice cream on the way home, because I couldn't remember the last time I had Toscanini's burnt caramel ice cream, which is one of my favorite things to eat -- I was going to say within a fifty-mile radius, but it's really one of my favorite things, period.
If I had more hours in my day, I would have baked these soft pretzels and would have carried out the Harvard Square coffee-and-bookstore-browsing part of the plan that we didn't have time for. But overall, one of my top ten favorite birthdays. (The ones before I was 20 all blur together, so I can't say definitively.)
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